1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to image processing and information management. More particularly, this invention relates to a person identifier and management system that can retrieve person-identifying information from a database based on an input face such that the input face can be identified.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is known, human nature typically shows that people want to be recognized by others. Thus, it is important for people to recognize and recall the names of other people they have previously met or acquainted during meetings, social functions, or other occasions. Not recognizing the person before you may affect you adversely. For example, if a superior or employer does not recognize or cannot recall the name of an inferior or employee, it may give the inferior/employee the impression that the supervisor/employer does not care about the inferior/employee, or the inferior/employee is not important in the organization. In addition, if a business person cannot recognize or recall the name of a business counterpart from another organization, it may affect the business dealing or potential business dealing with the organization that business counterpart represents.
However, for people who have a relatively large number of casual acquaintances, association of faces with names is a difficult memory game. In addition, some people are just not good at recognizing or recalling names of formal acquaintances, especially when the formal acquaintances have only been briefly introduced to you. Change of environment may also cause problems for people to recognize or recall names of others. For example, a person will have more difficulty in recognizing people initially if the person is surrounded by a large number of strangers (e.g., in a new office building).
With the advance of computer and image processing technologies, it is now possible to store an image in a computer system. This can be done using a digital camera to capture an image. In addition, a scanner can be used to convert a printed image into digital form. The digital image includes image pixels (or dots) arranged in a matrix. The data for each image pixel are then stored in the computer. The digital image can be retrieved for display from the computer.
This allows a face image database to be built in a computer system that can help the user to manage the acquaintances' information. The face image database typically stores a number of face images and the person-identifying information associated with each of the stored images. The person-identifying information is typically a text information that identifies the face. The person-identifying information in text format may include name, contact information, date and occasion of last meeting or all the prior meetings. When the user retrieves a face image from the database, the person-identifying information associated with that image is also retrieved from the database. When the person-identifying information is displayed with the associated face image, the user can then recognize the face and recall the name of the face.
However, searches within this face image database is still nearly impossible. In order to identify a desired face image stored in the computer based on an input face image, the prior art typically causes the computer to compare the image pixel data of the input face image with the corresponding pixel data of each of the images stored in the computer. The comparison typically takes a very long time to complete and uses a lot of system resources (e.g., memory and communication bandwidth). This is because the computer has to compare each image pixel data of the input face image with the corresponding image pixel data of each of the stored face images. A match occurs when each pixel data of the input face image is similar the corresponding pixel data of a stored face image. Using this method, unless the two compared images are extremely similar, it is very difficult to find a match between any two face images. This is especially true because noise and other positional errors may be introduced into the image data when the input face image is captured.